Back in the saddle on Beinn Dearg

Hemingway stated that there are only three sports: motor racing, mountain climbing and bull fighting, all other pastimes being mere games. Mountain climbing - the only one of Hemingway's sports in which I participate - covers a huge and diverse range of endeavour, all the way from a gentle summer afternoon's hillwalking at one end to extreme alpinism at the other.

Scottish winter climbing sits somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain the attractions this bizarre sport to the uninitiated. It is often uncomfortable and frightening. It always makes obscene demands on your time. A day's sport involves rising in the middle of the night, driving for several hours, then walking in to a remote coire with a heavy pack for several more hours to find yourself at the bottom of a route by 1000 hrs, if you are lucky. At this time of year that leaves six hours of daylight, so it almost inevitable that you will be completing your descent in the dark. It doesn't take too much in the way of unexpected delay - route finding difficulties or icy roads for instance -  for night to fall before the technical climbing is complete. Despite- or perhaps because of - these hardships, a good winter day  repays this effort and more. For a winter route is a true adventure; once committed the route fills one's awareness completely, there is a tangible feeling of  memories being indelibly etched onto the consciousness, to be drawn on later in defense against the humdrum and the mundane. 

Toddy setting off on  Penguin Gully, Beinn Dearg

The trouble is that very often one is not rewarded with a good winter day. Many factors can conspire against success, but the main difficulty is in the prediction of conditions.  There are few experiences more deflating than arriving in a coire to find the buttresses black and dripping, with no routes in acceptable condition. This deflation arises not just from the feeling of having wasted the physical energy expended on the day, it is also the mental energy that has been invested during the preceding weeks: poring over weather forecasts, avalanche forecasts, guidebooks and maps;  scouring discussion forums and blogs; juggling work, social and family commitments so that they can be dropped at a day's notice when the the stars align. For conditions are fickle; some routes may be in condition for only a few days a season, others may be climbable only once in a decade. It is disappointing to waste energy by heading out on a poor day, but that is nothing compared to the pain of having to spend a perfect winter day at work. The stress of walking this tightrope between glory and  disappointment can result in a winter angst so all-consuming that it is often a great relief when spring comes and the ice tools can be stowed away for another season.

For a variety of reasons I have drifted away from winter climbing over the last few seasons, notching up fewer and fewer routes each year. Last season I didn't even attempt to go climbing, investing my energies in ski mountaineering instead. Ski mountaineering is has many selling points: less equipment is required, reducing both bag weight and preparation time. One can move much faster, reducing the need for early starts. Skiing is not frightening. But the main advantage of taking to the hills on ski is it provides the opportunity to soak up the precious winter sun. The winter climber is perversely compelled by his thirst for ice and frozen turf to grovel in the cold shade of north-facing coires while the ski mountaineer is up on the ridges basking in sunshine. We see so little winter sun here that it seems criminally wasteful to deliberately avoid it.

Happily leaving the ice behind for some more reassuring  frozen turf

Back in September I was inspired by Pete Macpherson's record of his previous season and decided that I would climb again this winter. On the 3rd of January I followed through on this threat, arranged a strong and highly motivated climbing partner and headed to Beinn Dearg, our sights set on Penguin Gully. We found two good ice pitches at the bottom of the gully but the snow on the easier upper section looked to be incomplete and so we traversed off to the right instead of finishing the route. The ice turned out to be quite variable, sometimes providing trustworthy placements  and sometimes cleaving off in disconcerting dinner-plates.This  fine day out had two effects on me. Firstly it confirmed my long-held suspicion of ice as a climbing medium,  secondly it restored my urge for winter climbing.  I fully intend to indulge further this season, with turfy routes in remote northwest venues and late season Nevis classics being top of the hit list.. 

A tale of two visits to Creag Meagaidh

Creag Meagaidh occupies a central position in Scotland both geographically and in terms of mountain sports.  Its cliffs, the view of which unfolds throughout the approach to Coire Ardair like the plot of a good novel, are rivaled in scale only by the likes of Ben Nevis and Ben Lair.  Walking the last few km into the coire is like entering a magical kingdom, like stepping into legend.

The cliffs of Coire Ardair from Lochan a'Choire, April 2006

On my first visit this impression was enhanced by the discovery of a snow dwelling - a tent within a snow wall, - like some kind of wintery Masai boma. We did not engage with the inhabitants, our eyes instead drawn skyward. We'd come to attempt the 1957 Face Route, originally climbed by a team including Chris Bonington and Dougal Haston. The route seemed a sensible choice in the prevailing snow conditions - lots of it and a thought provoking avalanche forecast. The route extends almost to the coire floor, leaving only a short snow slope to negotiate. As we surveyed the face I became uneasy about an apparently unavoidable and heavily loaded snow slope high on the route. My partner, who was more experienced than I, was less concerned. He was confident that we would surmount it somehow and his enthusiasm carried us up to take a soggy, dripping belay at the base of the route. After a bit of exploratory poking we pronounced the route out of condition and the game a bogey. We retreated to the car park with our tails between our legs, lamenting the amount of effort required to participate in our chosen sport.

Sitting in the boot of his estate car was a ski tourer, his tanned face justifiably smug at having successfully executed his day's sporting plans on the ridges while we were groveling our way to failure in the chilly shade of the coire. The wisdom of skiing in preference to climbing under such snow conditions began to dawn on me and the ambition to undertake a ski mountaineering ascent of Creag Meagaidh started to take root in my imagination.

That ambition was realised on Sunday. Rushes of euphoria tingled at my temples as I skinned along the ridge towards the summit plateau under blue skies, a hard-earned natural high that will stay with me forever. Row upon row of snow peaks lay ahead, but my eye was drawn irresistibly to the cliffs of Coire Ardair. I no longer feel the same hunger to test myself on the classic climbs that grace their faces, yet I know that a combination of perfect conditions and a suitably motivated partner could easily see me fall under their spell once again. My pulse quickens at the thought.

View from Carn Liath summit towards Coire Ardair and Coire a'Chriochairean, January 2009. This is the same shot as featured in my previous post, hopefully less grainy this time.

The arctic wastes of the Monadhliath stretched away to my right, a blanket of white broken only by the  vulgar dark green of the conifer plantations that lie to either side of Melgarve bothy and the line of pylons – soon to be super pylons - that march from its doorway over the Corrieyairak Pass towards the Great Glen.

Revisiting a place like Creag Meagaidh provides an opportunity to see clearly the person that I was on my previous visit. The gradual changes that have occurred, almost imperceptibly, over the intervening years are brought into sharp focus by the relative timelessness of the landscape. Such changes are practically invisible from the comfortable vantage point of our day to day routines.Wild places provide the punctuation we need to make sense of our stories. This visit highlighted how my motivations have evolved over the last few years. I wonder what insights my next visit will provide?

Creag Meagaidh has been managed as a National Nature Reserve since it was was purchased by SNH in 1985. I've been mulling over issues of land management, re-wilding and species introduction and will discuss them in next week's post.

A bright future for Scottish winter climbing?

We may be standing on the threshold of a period of bumper winters! This glimmer of hope for Scottish winter climbing in the face of seemingly inevitable global warming comes from the recent prediction that, over the next decade or so, temperatures might fall, rather than rise.

The prevailing westerly wind plays a large part in determining the humidity and the temperature of the British climate. The strength of this wind is in turn dictated by the balance between the Iceland Low and the Azores High, two pressure systems that lie to the west, an effect known as the North Atlantic Oscillation

It's important to emphasise that global warming has not ended; the overall warming trend will continue. It is just that the cooling effect of a shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation may briefly overwhelm mankind's effect on the climate.

Will we see more of this over the next few years? Coigach in winter; Stac Pollaidh from Cul Beag.

My appetite for this impending bonanza of winter sport was whetted by Dean Lords' article in issue 27 of Alpinist magazine. I quote a few lines below:

“Our remote mysteries require perfect timing and luck to unlock.......A line could vanish for three years, then flicker back like a ghost.....this landscape rarely reveals its secrets on the first or second visits; it could take a lifetime to know.”

Lords was describing the Lost River Range in Idaho, but to me these lines encapsulate all that makes winter climbing in Scotland's fickle climate such a compelling and satisfying sport. Charming though this unpredictability is, I certainly won't be complaining if the North Atlantic Oscillation dishes up some more reliable conditions in the coming seasons!